A little while back, FBM Bikes Team Legend Mike Tagliavento (or Mike Tag as we all know him) was diagnosed with cancer. Aside from being all together shitty, we all know that stuff like that is unbelievably expensive to treat. FBM immediately set up a fund for Tag, and riders all over the globe have been coming together to kick in money. Today’s gathering in Hillsboro, Oregon was organized by some locals including Pro rider Chester Blacksmith, in an effort to raise some money through prize raffles and a BBQ. From a turnout perspective, this was one of the larger Northwest jams I’ve been too, which hopefully resulted in some decent help for Tag. If you’d like to help out Mike, here’s a link to the FBM Bikes page where you can do so.

Above is Portland’s favorite former Huffy rider, Josh “Boyd” Cornell, who took some time off of the Party Planet and shredded some lookbacks. You can check out some more photos after the jump (the horizontal photos, including the one above can be blown up by clicking them). High turndown ration warning.

Evan Abernathy.

Pauly Cvikevich, turndown 180 over a hip.

Jake is a Glenhaven local with toboggans on lockdown.

Snotty regulating/selling raffle tickets.

Ben Hucke, 270 turndown over the hip.

Mike Lund, with a Shad Johnson approved turndown.

The sun is back in Portland, hopefully for a while now. I cut out of the office early, admittedly for the second day in a row, to go ride bikes. I met up with Roman Tencza, Mark Rainha, and a few others at the Tigard Skatepark, and fired off a few photos of Roman and some local skate rippers. You can view them bigger after the jump.

Just over a week ago I posted a photo of Snotty riding Burnside and meant to do something with this photo at the same time. I forgot about it in my current catalog production chaos, and it’s been sitting on my desktop since. Anyway, it’s a brakeless walltap out of the big wall.

Chester Blacksmith has been out for a couple months with a separated shoulder, but we were able to get out today and shoot a photo at Pier Park for one of his sponsors. The photo above is a light test for the photo we were shooting (which I just sent off for their catalog). Simple, high, full-pipe carves like this are timeless, though, so I couldn’t let this one sit in a folder on the hard drive.

At noon on a typical Thursday Codie Larsen should be eating lunch in his high school cafeteria, but lucky for him, spring break coincided with great weather here in Portland. Codie’s 16, rides for Sputnic, and has been killing it here in the Portland area lately. Pier Park in St. Johns (where this was shot) is right around the corner from Codie’s house, so he’s got the place dialed. This bowl, the biggest thing at Pier, and one of the bigger bowls in the area, is 11 feet deep. Always good to see the younger kids boosting out of big stuff. Maybe Codie has some vert riding in his future? Click the photo to go bigger with it in a new window.

A lot of custom bikes rolling through here lately. If you dig these you can check out some previous bikes I shot here and here. If you missed it, you can also check out the video I did on Jordan Hufnagel for Level Magazine here.

Hufnagel and Argonaut are both Portland builders I shoot regularly. DeSalvo is a well-known builder from Ashland who I’m told cranks out a ton of high-quality builds, many of them (the below bike as well) in Titanium. Nice, very different bikes from all the guys. Check them out after the jump.

Okay, so the second day’s post from hanging out with the Levi’s team in Portland actually doesn’t include any photos of the Levi’s team (except the shot above of Anthony and Ronnie), they’re all of Ben Hucke, but he admits to owning at least one pair of Levi’s. We met up with the filming crew at Burnside in the morning. Ben fired out some huge, high speed Ruben-style wallrides on the big wall, and then found a wild wallride to flat on the outskirts of the park, off a new transition they’re building. Anthony and Ronnie filmed some lines with Will Stroud and Fuel TV, then we moved on to a wild spot Ben had found down the road, which you’ll see after the jump.

Ben Hucke, Ruben-style wallride at Burnside.

Ben Hucke, huge wallride to flat.

Ben found this crazy roof, and actually started on the backside, went over it like a spine, and then rolled in, down, and off the shed roof... all at high speed and without brakes.

How do you get onto the roof? How else. You climb.

Part of the Levi’s BMX team has been in town filming for some web edits this week, as well as Anthony Napolitan’s upcoming FuelTV “Firsthand” show. Anthony, his brother Ronnie, who also kills it for Levi’s, along with master filmers Will Stroud (Levi’s) and Jeremy from Fuel were in town, so I tagged along with them for a few days of fun/madness. I missed out on the first few days for a trip to California, but made it back for their final two days of filming in town. Ben Hucke and Roman Tencza hit up the sessions as well (Roman got hurt the first day), and even the mysterious and elusive Ryan Barrett made it out with us. Some great riding went down, so I’ll post some stuff here from the first day, and then some more shots tomorrow from the second day (today). These shots are from Vancouver, WA, and Tigard, OR.

Anthony Napolitan, hip invert, Vancouver, WA.

Ben Hucke, can-can, Vancouver, WA.

Anthony Napolitan, hip turndown, Vancouver, WA.

Anthony Napolitan, no-hander over the hip, Tigard, OR.

Shot a street spot with Ben Graham tonight near my house in SE Portland. Originally he just planned to 50/50 the horizontal support of this fence out of a small bank below, but after he got that done he figured he’d move on to try and nosepick it. When we were down to our last slivers of light he managed to land it clean. Upon finishing the shoot Ben said “You better blog this.”

Portland Oregon is seeing some action the last couple weeks. First it was Trifecta, and now the Dew Tour has rolled into Rip City. Part of the reason I moved up here is that it has some of the best BMX and Skateboarding in the world and this week is a good one.

The folks at Dew changed up the schedule a bit from what the riders are used to, leaving guys in town a day or two early thinking they would have practice. But with the course not yet complete, a slew of BMX riders took to the city by train, hitting up some of the areas incredible skateparks. Fortunately I have a car, but it’s a small car. So the shredders were stuck on the train, while I drove a car full of camera gear around.

After a train ride to Beaverton, followed by a six-mile bike ride, a group which included Brian Hunt, Anthony and Ronnie Napolitan, Andy Buckworth, Morgan Wade, Cory Nastazio, Luke Parslow, Roman Tencza, Zack Earely, Seth Klinger, and more made it to Tigard Skatepark, also known as “that park with the dinosaur.”

I shot a bunch of photos and got a bunch of good stuff, some of which is here, mere hours later. Ronnie Napolitan, for the record, is killing it. That kid was good before, but holy shit. Big Brother Anthony isn’t too shabby either. I think he actually “won” the session. And a good session it was.

Fortunately for those guys there is a train directly from Tigard to Portland later in the day (it only runs during rush hour) so they didn’t have to ride another six miles after the session.

Drew Bezanson

Roman Tencza

Morgan Wade

Ronnie Napolitan

Roman Tencza

Zack Earely

Casey Badger

Seth Klinger, Flexing?

Roman Tencza